


Hideous Thing Inside

by Auchen



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 03:12:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8311804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auchen/pseuds/Auchen
Summary: Liz, now a therapist, believes that she left lycanthropy back in her teenage years–nothing more than a nightmare of adolescence. But when a man comes into her life claiming he knew her father, and more importantly, knows what she is, it seems that the monster of her youth is coming back to haunt her.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I accidentally deleted this whole fic, sooo I'm reuploading the first two chapters, along with the new third chapter! Oops. 8') This story was originally written for this Halloween prompt I received on tumblr: 
> 
> Red is a werewolf and comes into Lizzie's life to mentor her through her first transition

☾

I.

"My own monster. (…) I thought I could control her. Then she broke loose."

\- Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

* * *

_Paws pounded on the ground, curled, yellowed leaves skittering away in the wake of her. Wide, thick tree trunks flanked her like ancient sentinels, silent witnesses to her hunt._

_A heartbeat throbbed in her ears—quick and alive, blood pounding through small, thin veins. She knew that the rabbit was near. It thought that it had hidden itself far enough into the depths of the earth, believing itself safely nestled up against the breast of the dirt. It knew the tunnels and the curves of the underground, but she every inch of the forest, each give and shift of the forest floor._

_She stopped, inches away from where her prey sat. Minutes passed, dragging by as birds trilled in the trees, establishing territory and begging for mates to fill an empty tree hollow with them. Red leaves dropped from the trees like rain made of fire._

_The throb of the rabbit's heart slowed. She cocked her head, sniffed the air. A gray nose emerged from the burrow, twitching once, twice, then—_

_Black eyes wide, feet kicking to try to propel itself back into the burrow--_

_**Too late, too late** _

_Her teeth were around its neck, canines digging into its velvet fur, sinking into its throat_

_It screamed, high and afraid (and noise sounded so much like a woman so long ago, like a woman she barely remembered, but who had died because of a bullets made of silver and a fire)._

_She shook her head, and its tiny bones crunched between her jaws, shattering as easily as dried twigs. She opened her mouth and let it roll from her jaws and flop to the ground, limbs long and crumpled. She lowered her head to tear into the rabbit, but then—_

_She was not a wolf any longer. She had flat teeth and bare, human skin, and her body shivered and seized at the touch of the cold, her knees pressed against damp earth and rotting leaves. And the rabbit was not a rabbit any longer. It was a dark haired woman with her throat torn out, skin ragged and shredded by vicious teeth, neck snapped at an unnatural angle._

_The woman was—_

_The woman was her, somehow._

* * *

She smacked the alarm clock off her nightstand so hard that it slammed to the floor, and it lay there blaring, red time flashing. Liz kicked sweat heavy sheets off and sat up in bed, sliding her hands down her face, taking a slow, deep breath.

It was just a dream.

Sometimes they came—an unwanted reminder of her lupine youth and nights spent running on four legs through rural Nebraska, hungry and on the hunt for something unknown to her. On one particularly bad night a year ago, Tom had woken her up, shaking her, blood on the pillow from where she had scratched his chest during a nightmare of guns and screams. She had pulled away from him with a rumbling growl, her mind still heavy with remembered wolfishness. He’d stared at her with wide eyes, hand over his chest, like he was truly afraid of her then. Moments later, she’d shuddered and retreated to the living room, resorting to blearily watching infomercials with her wild heart still hammering in her chest, running a thumb over her fingers, wondering if her nails seemed any sharper and pointed than they had been when she went to bed.

The dreams started regularly coming once a month after she and Tom divorced six months ago for reasons unrelated to residual lycanthropy. Incompatibility and emotional toxicity had a tendency to corrode marriages.

Then they came two or three times a month in the night after Sam had died two months ago.

Liz’s feet hit the floor as she walked away from the bed and stooped down, picking up the alarm clock in one hand, leaving her other hand to clamp down over her ear. 

She didn’t turn into a wolf anymore, but the heightened senses never had gone away. Sometimes it was a blessing, but mostly it was just irritating.

 Setting the clock down on the nightstand and pressing the “off” button, she headed to her closet to dress. She still had an hour before her first client’s appointment, so she had plenty of time to make herself a plain piece of toast, but she didn’t think she was going to be able to eat anything.

* * *

First time sessions didn’t make her nervous exactly, but she did feel a certain stress about all of it. Typically Liz knew very little about the person aside from the way they sounded on the other line—uncertain, afraid, neutral—, and they didn’t always volunteer a reason for wanting to see a therapist.

All she knew about the man that was due to arrive in several minutes was that he had a voice deep enough that it made her cheek tingle with the reverberation of his voice as she held the phone to her ear, and despite the fact that it wasn’t an unpleasant voice, still made her wish she’d turned the volume down after she’d talked to one of her quieter clients. He was probably middle aged, she’d guessed. All he’d said was that he was going through some fairly stressful things and he was shopping around for a therapist. When he heard she offered a reduced fee for the first session, he agreed to meet with her.

Just as she was going to check her watch, there was a heavy knock on the door. Liz stood and lay clipboard on her chair and walked to the door, slowly pulling it open. 

The first thing she noticed was the scent of him—mostly, it was just cologne, sharp and strong, something that knifed at her nostrils, but underneath, there was a familiar smell. Something wild, something she couldn’t name, but that put the image of tall trees and pounding paws back in her head. Liz leaned her hand against the doorknob and held the other out to him. He took her hand and gave it a firm shake, and with her head cleared, she saw that her first guess about his approximate age was correct. The man that grasped her hand was probably in his 50s, hair shaved closed to his head as a practical, no-nonsense method of dealing with a receding hairline. Even with his age, there was something confident and magnetic in the way he carried himself.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Reddington. Please, come in and have a seat.” She pulled her hand away from him and tilted her head at the chair across from the one her clipboard sat in.

His mouth curled. “What, there’s no couch?”

“I hide a couch in the broom closet if you really want one,” she said. Joking with a client so early on could be risky, but he had initiated it, and besides, it was a fairly harmless joke at that.

“In that case, I think I’ll stick with the chair. I’d prefer not to be engulfed in a cloud of dust while I’m pouring out my deepest insecurities.” Reddington walked to the chair and sank down into it, movements slow and purposeful.

At the comment, she gave a small, involuntary smile, grateful that he was good humored thus far and he hadn’t taken her joke the wrong way. She picked up the clipboard and pen before sitting down. “Well, we don’t have to talk about your deepest insecurities quite yet, since you haven’t settled on a therapist. If you decide to become a long term client, there’s plenty of time for that in the future. For now, let’s just get to know each other and figure out what it is that you want.”

“ _Goodness_ , Miss Keen, you’re quite straightforward.” He crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in his seat.

“I’m sorry if it came across as blunt,” Liz said, folding her hands against the clipboard. Based on their brief phone call, she thought he wouldn’t have minded getting straight to the point, but perhaps she’d misjudged.

“Oh no, not at all,” Reddington said, shaking his head and holding a flat palm out to her. “I appreciate it, in fact.”

Her brief doubt over her intuition subsided. “I’m glad to here that. So, I know you said you were searching for a therapist due to stress. Do you want to talk about that?”

He tapped one index finger against his leg and pressed his lips to the side. “It’s not so much recent stress as it is an ongoing problem I have been dealing with for the majority of my adult life.”

Despite his professed love of people being forthcoming, it seemed that Reddington himself wasn’t going to be particularly transparent with his motives for seeing a therapist. “That’s difficult, I’m sure. If you’ve been dealing with it for most of your life, is there something specific that prompted you to seek counseling?”

“Well, it is a particular type of stress that only a very small portion of the population could understand. I simply thought that you were probably one of those people that would understand my specific sort of stress, Miss Keen.”

“Call me Liz. Miss Keen was my—well, actually she wasn’t my anything. But just call me Liz. But what is it about me that made you think I would understand?” On her website, she stated that one of her specialties was helping those with anxiety disorders. Perhaps that was what he was talking about.

“You were recently divorced, isn’t that correct?” He tilted his head, his clever gray-blue eyes trained on her, and for a moment, she was struck by a sense of deja vu at the wolfish mannerism. But once the deja vu wore off, she was hit with the fact that there was no reasonable excuse for him to know that fact about her.

Her fingers tightened around the clipboard. “How do you know that?”

“And you recently suffered a personal loss too,” he said, and at that, his eyes fell to the floor.

She swallowed. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave if you don’t explain yourself right now.”

“Lizzie—”

She inhaled at the nickname. It was like going through a box of old photographs she hadn’t seen for years, and being assaulted with a sick longing and nostalgia for the scenes that were captured in the faded photos. But it wasn’t _his_ to use. The nickname was a private thing, only to be spoken by someone that cared for her. And of the two people that had ever called her that, one had been booted from her life six months ago, and the other was dead.

“I asked you to explain. If you don’t I, _will_ make you leave,” she said, nose wrinkled, teeth pressed together.

He sighed and slid his hand over his leg and spread his fingers in the air. “The personal stress that I was talking about—you know what I am, don’t you? You knew when you opened the door.”

She remembered something Sam had told her once: _“There are others like you. I knew one once, he was my friend. That’s how I know about them. I don’t know about any others though, I think they might be rare. But you’re not the only one, Lizzie. You need to know that. You’re not alone.”_

After he’d told her that, she had latched onto that vague idea that there were others like her, that even if she couldn’t see them, there were other people that felt the shift and gnaw in their chest before the full moon rose above the tree line.

And maybe, just maybe there was one sitting in front of her, only a few feet away, and somehow he knew things about her.

But the only experience she’d ever had with a werewolf was with herself, and her wolf self had been vicious and mercurial, just as likely to be skittish and jump away someone throwing a rock as she was to go for someone’s throat. If she knew anything about werewolves, it was that they couldn’t be trusted.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him, the tips of her fingers white as she pressed down on the clipboard.

“When as many chaotic things happen to some as they happen to you, sometimes the change can be triggered again after going decades without a transformation,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard her at all. “And it can be worse the second time than it was the first. I can help you with it.”

She stood, and as she did, his head moved, eyes tracking her movements. The hair along the back of her neck prickled. “If you aren’t here for a therapy session, then please leave. I have another appointment in half an hour, and if you don’t need anything, I can use that time to prepare.”

His eyes fell still, no longer flicking across her. His jaw moved like he was chewing over an idea, and after a moment, he said, “I knew Sam.”

Something twisted inside her. He could’ve been lying, but how would he have known Sam’s name otherwise? Maybe he _had_ known Sam, but had been an enemy of his in her father’s criminal days. But then, how would he have know what—

_Oh._

_“I knew one once, he was my friend.”_

“If you’d like, I can explain a few things to you tonight. Over dinner, perhaps?” His raised his eyebrows and smiled at her, seeming mild and benign. But any wolf could clothe himself in kindness when all he was planning on doing was tearing you apart later.

But still, he had every chance to do something to her, and he hadn’t yet. And he did know about Sam, and what she was. Some part of her wanted to shove any rational protests aside and drag her chair next to him and ask him what it was like—had he, too, woken up with the taste of someone else’s blood in his mouth?

She had spent so many years alone with her private beast that the chance of meeting another monster that understood her was something she selfishly wanted to hold onto.

“Fine.” She crossed her arms. “We’ll have dinner at eight-thirty.”

He stood up and nodded his head to her. “It’s a date, then.”

“No, it’s _not_.” She was willing to talk, but she _wasn’t_ playing out the absurdity of a lycanthropic dinner date, especially with someone that she had barely met that knew mysterious details about her life.

“I’ll see you at eighty-thirty all the same, then.”

* * *

She was thirteen the first time happened.

She woke up with the taste of copper in her mouth, a sore chin, and to a story on the local news about a woman that had been attacked by a medium sized dog the night before when she was out jogging. She was lucky to get away with just a chunk taken out of her leg, they said. The dog had jaws like a steel trap, and she’d only been able to get away from it by repeatedly hitting its jaw with her fist. After hearing the report, Liz had bared her teeth in the mirror, and saw the red gloss that covered her teeth like the film of a wine stain. Then she'd scrubbed at her tongue with the toothbrush until it was raw and stung and only tasted even more salty and metallic.

She didn’t eat breakfast.

At school the entire day, her body was sore, and she felt like her skin was stretched all wrong over her bones—all at once too tight and too loose. When she was called on to answer a question, her mind had been so distant that she nearly yipped in surprise at the sound of her name. And then, she wondered, why did she want to _yip_?

When Liz had come home, Sam was waiting for her at the door, and he guided her to the sofa, saying her that there was something he needed to tell her. It was then he had told her the absurd story that she was a werewolf, and he hadn’t told her earlier because sometimes the curse never manifested itself, sometimes not even when a child had been born to two werewolves. He’d hoped that maybe she would lead a normal, human life, but it seemed that that hope had gone up in smoke last night.

She’d just laughed, and told him to stop joking with her. She’d asked for proof, and he’d had none.

The story dropped until next month.

She’d woken up at the front door from what she’d thought was sleep with Sam’s hands on her shoulders, trying to drag her back to bed. With sharpening teeth, she’d snapped at him and unlocked the door, running off into the night with something sharp clawing at her chest.

The next morning she walked in the front door a piece of someone’s shirt between her teeth, and Sam held her on the living room floor as she sobbed, and he’d called in to the school and told them she was sick and wouldn’t be in that day.

That was when she begged him to buy her a cage.


	2. Chapter 2

☾

II.

“I don’t know how to stay tender with this much blood in my mouth.”

—Emma Tranter

* * *

During the rest of her client’s sessions, Liz struggled to seem as normal and as relaxed as possible. One of the clients had even asked if she was fine, and she waved it off with a laugh that she was sure sounded fake. After the sessions, she dialed the number Reddington had given her when he’d first scheduled a session with her. Half-way through the day, she’d realized they hadn’t settled on a place to meet.

He’d picked up only after two rings. “Lizzie,” he said, smooth as silk, dark as wine, “I know you are likely eager to talk to me, but I thought we agreed—”

“Yes, we did, but you didn’t tell me where to meet you. We both know that…” her hand grew tight around the cell phone, “what we are doesn’t grant telepathy or anything.”

There was a pause, thoughtful and long. “We’ll meet at The Den. It’s near enough to your rented office, and it’s small, intimate, and private. Just the thing for us.”

“The Den? Is this you trying to be funny?” She paced around the perimeter of the empty room,

“Well, I do find it fitting, and as I said, it’s practical as well. I see no reason not to go somewhere ironic and useful,” he said, and something loud whooshed by on the other side of the line. She turned the sound down. He must’ve been outside somewhere.

“Okay, I’ll meet you there then. Goodbye.” She ended the call before he could get any more quips in.

* * *

The Den was just as how Reddington had described it—small and intimate, the kind of place that you only knew about because a friend of a friend frequented it while working on their novel. It wasn’t a coffeehouse by any means, but it did have the insulated, cozy feel of one, with its dark collor scheme, dim lighting, and bookshelf lining one of the walls.

There were several people at the front desk, and a hostess with thick black glasses and a tight ponytail approached her. “How many?” the girl asked.

“I meeting someone here. He would’ve given the name Raymond Reddington,” she said, and as she said his name, it felt odd, like it was a deep secret she’d just told a stranger.

The girl lifted up a piece of paper from a clipboard and nodded. “Follow me.”

As she followed the girl, Liz kept her gaze straight ahead, feeling as if everyone’s eyes were on her. She wouldn’t have pegged herself as self conscious exactly, but she hadn’t done anything like this in quite awhile, not since she and Tom started seriously dating and nice nights out became somewhat uncommon, the mundanity of a long-term relationship settling in and making things like dining out seem less important. Restaurants had then moved from “uncommon” to “rare” after they’d married.

Even though this wasn’t a date, it still felt an awful lot like one, and that made her profoundly uncomfortable. And it certainly didn’t help that the fact that they were going to be discussing lycanthropy made the whole thing feel simultaneously ridiculous and illicit. The hostess stopped at a booth near the back corner, secluded away from most of the other guests. She wondered if he’d requested it.

“The waiter will be along shortly,” she said, and left her as slid into the booth across from Reddington.

Liz took her purse off her shoulder, set it next to her and folded her hands in her lap, and as she raised her eyes to Reddington, she wondered if her intense gaze had been yellow for a moment, or if it had been a trick of the strange lighting.

“You look quite nice,” he said, eyes flicking to the blue blazer that she wore. “I approve of the selection.” He too was wearing a blazer, though it was black.

“…Thanks.” She lifted her hands from her lap and wrapped them around the menu, dropping her eyes to it. She’d chosen a blazer since The Den wasn’t the sort of place you just wore jeans and a T-shirt to, but neither was it the sort of dining establishment that made people want to deck themselves out in heels and pearls or an expensive suit and tie. Choosing a blazer was a reasonable clothing decision, but something still bothered her about the fact that they’d chosen essentially the same thing.

She flicked through the menu. “So—what do you recommend?” Liz knew she was delaying the necessary conversation, but she wanted something about the night to feel normal before diving into discussions of curses and full moons.

“I recommended the grandmother,” he said, quite matter-of-factly.

She narrowed her eyes at him, one finger pressed on the drinks section. “Very funny.”

“Well, if you prefer something more conventional, I hear that the chicken is quite good, but I typically prefer the steak myself.” He shrugged and pushed his menu to the center of the table with stiff hands.

She ended up ordering the chicken salad, just to prove a point. Whether it was to herself or to him, she wasn’t sure. Evidently a man of his word—at least in terms of dining—Reddington ordered the steak. They ate in silence for several minutes, her staring down at the salad, pushing around the lettuce, slowly eating it, smelling the drifting scent of his steak, occasionally wishing she’d simply ordered the chicken.

“For someone that claimed not to possess telepathy, you seemed to be trying hard to use it,” he said, knife scraping over the plate. She flinched at the noise. “…I’m sorry,” he said, and the scraping stopped.

Liz put her fork down, leaning it against the rim of the plate. “Okay, well, first off—how did you know my father?”

“We ran in similar circles at one point in time,” he said, cutting chunk off the steak.

“You mean you two were both criminals at one point?” At that, he said nothing, just looked at her, gnawing at the slice of steak.

“I know some of the things he used to do and the kinds of people he used to hang around with. You don’t need to protect Sam’s memory,” she said. The idea that he didn’t want to tarnish her idea of Sam was…well, at the very least, it was noble.

“Yes. We both indulged in some criminal activities. But we’re not here to discuss your father are we, Lizzie?” He raised an eyebrow.

She exhaled a quick breath of air, shoved her plate away from her and flopped back against the leather seat with crossed arms. “And what am I supposed to ask when you won’t tell me anything to base my question off of? Do you just want to talk at me?”

His jaw tightened. “I’m not here for my own amusement. Like I said earlier, I’m here to help. The full moon is coming next week.”

“Fine, then let’s start there—why should I be worried about changing now? I’ve dealt with bad things and sudden events before. Why should my divorce and Sam’s death trigger anything?” She tapped an index finger against the table.

“Yes, but have you dealt with two such major changes all at once, so close together? I have no doubt that you’re a survivor, but things can build up, and large, significant events can an act as a catalyst to cause you to change again.” He folded his napkin into a perfect triangle, placed it next to the plate, and leaned forward.

“Why did I stop changing when I was eighteen?” Maybe it wasn’t the most pertinent question to be asking, but she didn’t want to consider the possibility of the transformation happening again, so she decided to settle on a safer topic she’d been wondering about your years.

“Sometimes people have a personality flaw, and instead of confronting it, they push it down and avoid dealing with it,” he said, voice lowering as someone walked by.

She scooted forward, craning her neck across the divide of the table. “It’s not like I have a temper problem and I’m in denial about needing anger management. This is a curse not—I mean, it is a flaw, but it’s more than that.”

“I don’t understand the technicalities of how it all works,” he said, spreading his hands. “But it’s a similar principle. It’s…not common for someone to be born a werewolf and stop transforming altogether. If something like this happens, the shifts still usually keep sporadically happening—maybe once every few months. It’s not often someone goes more than a decade with no changes.”

“I’m a freak among freaks then?” Liz smiled at the idea of it. If she was going to be an anomalous lycanthrope, she’d gladly be odd because she didn’t change.

He frowned at that, eyes tracing the curve of her smile. “You’re not a freak,” he said softly, and the way he said it was such a change from the rest of their conversation, it made her scoot back an inch.

“Then why is this happening?” She straightened, something instinctual telling her not to show vulnerability. She didn’t know if it was a human or wolf instinct.

“Some—” he glanced to the side again as another person passed their table. “Some werewolves suppress their wolf side so much that it becomes dormant, but significant events like the ones you’ve experienced can reawaken the wolf, and what follows isn’t…pretty, usually.” As he spoke, his eyes were on her, expression kind and pitying in equal measure.

The pity was what made her shoulders rise. She didn’t need pity, especially not from someone she didn’t know, not from some man that might not be trustworthy. What had he done to show her that he could be any help at all? The answer was nothing. He’d told her plenty about the potential problem, but hadn’t offered any sort of solutions.

She leaned down and started to pull her purse back up onto her shoulder. “Well, thank you for the dinner Mr. Reddington, but I think I need to go. My scheduled is booked very full tomorrow, so—”

He half stood up and held up a hand, a motion for her to stay, just for a moment. “I know that you want proof as to how I can help you. That’s entirely understandable, but you won’t know if you don’t give me a little more time to explain.”

Her fingers slightly loosened around her purse strap, eyes darting to her mostly untouched salad, then back up to him. He wasn’t aggressively insisting that she listen. He was trying to reason with her. He was asking. The asking didn’t make her trust him, but it did make her feel a bit more favorable towards him. If he wanted to force her to listen, she was certain that he would’ve tried already.

“Okay. But let’s not do it here.”

And with that, they called for the check. Liz paid her half, feeling it was unfair to make him pay for something that she’d hardly eaten. He frowned about it for a moment, but didn’t argue. She supposed that he knew how to pick his battles, and arguing over who was going to pay what part of the bill took lower precedence over the more important issues at hand.

* * *

There was some argument to be made that going out into the darkness with a man she barely knew was an idiotic idea. And perhaps it was, but she had parked close to The Den near a street light, and there were enough people in the restaurant and surrounding establishments that that particular parking lot wouldn’t be a smart place to try to attack a woman. Besides, even if he did try anything, though she no longer turned into a wolf, her body still remembered how to fight and tear just as savagely as it had when she was an animal.

She stopped next to her car and turned to face him on the ball of foot, hands in her pants pockets. She shrugged and pressed her fingers into her pockets.

“Okay, here we are. What do you want to tell me?” Liz leaned her back against the car.

“Given the right help and training, you can learn to better control your wolf.” He looked up at the sky and sighed, his breath a pale vapor drifting into the air in the cooling night. “Actually, control isn’t the right word. It’s better described living in balance and agreement with it.”

“What then—are you a werewolf yoga instructor? Do you want me to get my chakras aligned?” She a hand over her torso and coughed a laugh, and it came out in a quick burst, a brief ghostly memory of her scorn hanging in the air.

“Perhaps if I show you something it will make more sense. May I?” Reddington held out one hand almost like he wanted her to take it.

She stared at it, unsure what he was asking. She rubbed her lips together. “As long as it isn’t anything—” Liz didn’t know how to finish the sentence. What did she want to say? As long as it isn’t weird? The entire thing was bizarre already. As long as it isn’t something depraved? Maybe that was closer to what she meant, but so far he’d given her no proof that he was the kind of man to do such a thing.

“I wouldn’t,” he said, perhaps filling in the blanks with the second meaning. “Watch.”

He held his hand in the air between them, fingers spread out stiffly, skin washed pale by the burn of the streetlight over them. The bones under the skin shifted, and she felt her stomach lurch, even though she’d gone through the same thing herself. It was just different watching it happen, rather than feeling it. She saw as the plain, bare human hand changed, white nails turning into black, curving claws, dark fur spreading until it was no longer a hand, but a wolf’s paw on a human wrist.

“How did—” Without thinking, her fingers darted out, skimming the air over the paw.

“If you become experienced enough, you can change when you choose to—well, the full moon isn’t optional, but the other changes are. You can even do things like this, though I admit there’s few occasions where it makes sense to do this.`” He turned his paw over, the pad on the bottom rough and crisscrossed with almost-scratches.

And, despite herself, she took the paw in her hand, turning it back over, thumb brushing over the thin fur. He held his paw limp, making no move to jerk it away from her. She held it in her palm as if she was cradling it.

“Does it hurt when you change when you want to?” That had been one of the worse things about it all. The first time the transformation came, she didn’t remember anything she did as a wolf, up to and including the change. But eventually, she started remembering things, and when she was fourteen and a half she stayed awake during the transformation for the first time. It itched and it burned, and it felt like her entire body—her organs and bones and teeth—were being pulled and re-molded by cruel, invisible potter’s hands.

“Yes, but not as much as it used to.” Then he removed his paw from her palm, but he did it slowly and, she thought for a moment, with some reluctance. She quickly shook that thought away. Liz averted her eyes as he changed the paw back into a human hand, but that still didn’t change the fact that she heard the quiet cracking noises as the bones reshaped themselves.

Well, at least he’d delivered on his promise of giving her some reason to let him help her. If she did become a wolf again, it was possible that it could be useful to have an older, experienced werewolf helping her avoid anything similar to what happened when she was younger. How often had she longed for someone to tell her how control it? How to keep the wolf from hurting anyone?

But then, there was no real proof she would change again. And she still knew very little about him personally. All she knew was this: Reddington was a werewolf, and he had known her father due to Sam’s criminal past. The fact that Reddington had once been a criminal (and still might have been) was not a point in his favor. What did it mean that a man that had a beast that lurked inside of him had done illegal activities? Liz had always guessed that some werewolves didn’t fight against their nature, but rather indulged in the worst aspects of it. She knew that she had to ask one more question, even though she wasn’t certain she wanted to know the answer.

Liz pressed her palms against the car door, the cold of the metal trickling into her veins. “Have you ever killed people?”

He hardly reacted to the question at all, but the muscles in his face still tensed. “Yes,” he said, the word harsh, bitten off at the end.

Her throat grew tight. The cold of the metal felt like fire. “Just on accident or on purpose? Or both?”

Reddington took a step closer to her, but she jerked her face away from him, lip curling up to reveal one canine tooth. She lowered her lip after a moment, shame twisting her stomach at the animalistic reaction.

“Lizzie—”

“Just answer the question,” she said, head whipping around to face him again, ponytail snapping against the back of her neck.

“Both,” came the answer, and it was stated as a fact, but tinged with something underneath it. Regret? Grief? She couldn’t read it.

But the emotion didn’t matter. All that mattered were the facts—and now she had three of them. Reddington was a werewolf, he had known Sam, and he had willfully killed people.

“I want you to go,” she said, pulling one hand off the car door like she was ripping it away from glue. She plunged it into the purse and dug around for the keys, fingers skittering across old gum wrappers and receipts. “You were right about one thing—I’m a survivor. If I become a wolf again, I can deal with this by myself.”

“Think through this, please. If you don’t accept my help, you might be hurting yourself, as well as others.” His eyes pinned her, and for a moment, she felt like a deer that had been spotted through the trees, in the eyesight of a predator about to crash through the brush.

Her hand closed around the keys, and its teeth bit into her palm. “Don’t you dare try to guilt me, not after what you just told me.” She stabbed her key into the lock, and the car unlocked with a thunderous clatter. Without waiting for him to say anything, she slid into the car, slammed the door, and drove off.

On the way back to her apartment, the gibbous moon looked down at her, the edge of it missing and dark, like an almost winking eye.

* * *

Sam bought her the cage. She didn’t ask where he got it, and he didn’t volunteer the information. She guessed that he maybe procured it from one of his old buddies from his past, and the thought made her all the more disgusted at herself. Liz didn’t want Sam having return to any aspects of his old life, but at the same time, she couldn’t allow herself to run wild.

The cage resembled a modified kennel for large dogs. It wasn’t tall enough for her to stand up in, but she could sit down in it. They kept it in the garage. The first time she used it, Sam came to her after she changed talking to her in a low voice, even as she snarled and paced the small perimeter of the cage, hackles raised, fur bristling, eyes darting like something hunted, looking for some way to escape.

She forgot to turn her homework in the next day, so the next month, she brought her homework in the cage with her, and she joked that Sam needed to take it away from her before she changed, because then she really could tell her teachers that her dog had ruined her homework. They both laughed at that. Even in the face of something so strange and terrifying, she managed to find some humor in it. But she had no other choice. If she only concentrated on the reality of it all how was she supposed to lead any semblance of a normal life?

That night, Sam stayed with her again after she changed, but instead of just trying to offer empty platitudes to a frightened, angry creature, he brought out a book of fairy tales that he hadn’t removed from their bookshelves since Liz was ten. He read his wolf-girl daughter stories until she stopped pacing and she lay on the floor of the cage, ears pricked, listening to the voice that she recognized somehow. He left after that, and the small she-wolf fell asleep until she became a girl once again.

Things continued in a similar manner until she was a fifteen.

That was when they had to coat the bars with silver.

One day in near end of September, the beginning of her freshman year, she’d awoken feeling more refreshed than she ever had after the night following a full moon. Usually, the morning after she felt weak and trembled through out the day, a headache pounding behind her eyes, bones aching. She wondered if a hangover felt similar.

That morning she didn’t tremble, and she didn’t ache. She boarded the bus entered the school with a light step and her backpack riding high on her shoulders. But her good mood quickly dissipated when she soon heard the story that was buzzing from student to student. The story originally spread from Michelle Wilson, disseminated throughout the halls, up and down through all sections of school hierarchy. Michelle had been attacked by a stray dog last night, they said.

She was biking home from a friend’s house, accompanied by her younger sister, and a dog had come out of nowhere and grabbed onto her backpack, taking Michelle to the ground with it. She was lucky the bike fell so one of the wheels covered her face, because the thing had scrambled at her and snapped, trying to savage her, but she protected by the spokes, though in the end she got a few scrapes from the edges of its claws and tips of its canine teeth before it was scared away by Michelle’s sister throwing a large rock in its direction.

When Liz heard the story, flashes came to her mind:

_Teeth snagging into the backpack’s fabric, tongue against the rough texture that tasted of stale crumbs and peanut butter, her body falling back with the weight of the backpack, the girl and the bike, a tumble of objects._

_A girl on the ground, face scrunched up, her body reeking of terror._

_And the terror made her salivate, made her more frenzied, turned her body into a live wire._

_Claws clacking against metal, her lips curled back, snout slamming against the bike, teeth scraping the girl’s skin, a fine spray of blood._

_Blur of a rock, paws scrambling on the pavement to dodge._

_Shouting, shouting, shouting coming from another girl who picked up another rock._

_Wind in her fur, gravel against pads of her paws as she ran._

She had to lean into her locker, face pressed against the metal, to keep everyone from seeing her shaking. Michelle was a girl that she had two classes with that, since the middle of last year, had seemed to make it her mission to make Liz as miserable as possible. Once or twice she’d wanted to punch Michelle. One of those times had been last week.

During second period, in math class, Michelle slammed down into her desk next to her friends, pulled out her history textbook and showed them the mangled bottom corner of the book, shredded cardboard peeking out from the cover, where the “dog’s” teeth had grabbed it. Liz stood up from her desk and asked the teacher if she could go to the nurse and lay down, because she was feeling sick. Apparently her pale, sweaty face convinced the teacher she wasn’t faking.

She stayed in the nurse’s office for the rest of the hour, nose wrinkled against the sharp smell of disinfectant and cleaning fluids.

She immediately told Sam about what had happened after she got home. He’d just nodded, and throughout the month, he’d melted down old utensils and coated the cage bars with silver. Her heart twinged at that—the silverware had been old, and he’d gotten it from a grandmother. But he’d just shrugged and told her they never used it anyway, and he was certain that his grandmother wouldn’t fault him for melting the silverware for a good cause.

* * *

The week leading up to the full moon, Liz went about business as usual—attending sessions with clients, making her bi-weekly grocery trip, cooking herself dinner, and so on and so on. She had only met with Reddington twice, and little had changed in the way of her routine after those meetings. It was easy enough on the surface to pretend that she had never met him at all, that the man that had ghosted just as quickly out of her life as he’d come into it was nothing more than a continuation of the strange, feverish dream of rabbits and ripped throats--strange and familiar, but just a dream nonetheless.

But it wasn’t the same. He had shifted something in her, and no matter how hard she tried to ignore it, it pressed against the back of her mind, rattling a round like a stubborn pebble stuck in her shoe that she couldn’t seem to dislodge. When the day of the full moon came, she felt like there was something in her chest that pressed against her ribs, pacing and pacing.

She knew the signs.

She just didn’t want to acknowledge them.

That night, she pulled a chair up to the window and watched the sky outside darken with the trepidation of one going to the doctor, waiting to find out if the diagnosis was terminal or not.

And as the sunset bled and heaved and turned black and the moon began to rise, her body felt like it was being burned from the inside out. But even as her body burned, she walked out of her apartment and wandered and wandered with her mind in a fog. That was the thing about the change—it happened before the body even transformed. Something took hold of her mind and told her what to do, where to wander, what secluded, safe spot to go to remove her clothes and remain vulnerable as she transformed.

The thing in her mind eventually lead her to a small, abandoned alley that stank of garbage and a dozen other rank things. She stripped off her clothes, folded them and placed them behind a piece of cardboard leaning against the brick wall.

She remembered nothing after that except for the pain.

* * *

The she-wolf knew that she was a woman.

The she-wolf also knew that she had a name, but her mouth was no longer formed in a way for her to pronounce it. But names and humanity did not matter. The only thing that mattered was now, and the things that could be touched and tasted and smelled. Worries about the past or future had no place in her mind.

The only thing she cared about was, I’m afraid or, What is this and, I’m hungry. So, so hungry.

As she stood up from the alley where she lay, she stumbled like someone that had been sitting for too long. Her limbs were numb and they tingled, but she was young and she was strong.

The she-wolf’s ears flicked and her head turned as she heard a siren screaming off in the distance, the noise scratching against her ear drums. Something told her that going in the direction of the siren wasn’t a good idea.

So she walked out of the alley in the opposite direction.

For the majority if the night, she simply wandered the nighttime streets of D.C., hanging to the shadows and sides of buildings, darting to a hiding place if too many people came close. She remembered when she had been bolder, but the last time the woman had let her out, they’d lived in a smaller place with more green and more open spaces.

This city was loud and dirty and overwhelming, and it had been so long since the she-wolf had been outside of the woman. Her senses were assaulted by dozens of inputs at once—the smell of stale water in the gutter clogging her nostrils, while at the same time her ears where slammed with two people shouting at each other from across the street.

After a while of wandering, something itched at the back of her mind, reminding her that the sun would be rising soon. Weary from the constant barrage of smells and sounds, she turned around and followed her own scent back to the alley where the woman had left her clothes. But as she approached the alley, there was a new scent.

Her nose twitched, and her ears tilted backward. She took a step forward.

She saw that it was a man leaning his shoulder against the wall, one hand pressed against his forehead. He stank of alcohol.

The she-wolf let out a warning growl. It was her place. Her territory. Her…

Den?

No, not den. That was…something else. Something from the woman’s life from last week.

After a moment, the man’s hand pulled away from his forehead, and he stared at her with hooded eyes and a glassy gaze, a loose, sloppy expression on his face made by muscles turned lax through intoxication.

“Huh,” he said, eyes narrowing, like that would help him understand the situation more clearly.

Her fur raised along her spine and she held her tail in the air, not moving from the spot. She snorted and growled again. She was warning him. Why wasn’t he leaving?

“Hey, mutt, go away,” he slurred, waving a hand in her direction.

She wasn’t warning him again. She started to walk past him, heading in the direction of the cardboard that hid the woman’s clothes, keeping the man in her periphery as she passed through the fruity, boozy scent cloud coming off of him.

Then the kick came to her ribs.

The tip of his shoe slammed into her side. And as she stumbled sideways, ears pinned back against her skull, something shifted inside her.

The man threw his head back, the white pearls of his teeth glimmering, and he laughed and laughed and laughed, stinking of booze, and hadn’t her nostrils been burned enough that night? Hadn’t she been patient? Hadn’t she skulked and hidden, cautiously learning the layout of the city before doing anything rash?

His foot came for her again, but she jumped back before it made contact.

Her muscles tensed, lips peeled back away from her teeth.

And he just laughed and laughed, cackling like a magpie. Her hind legs bunched up. Her claws pressed into the concrete.

And when she launched herself into the air, the man was no longer laughing. The man’s neck was pale and bare, a vein throbbing beneath his jaw. He raised his forearm in front of his throat, but not before her jaws clamped onto his arm, blood exploding into her mouth, teeth meeting bone.

His screams only lasted for a while.


	3. Chapter 3

☾

III.

“I'm not always like this, it's something I've become

A terrible weakness, in my nature, in my blood

Save me, oh save me,

Save me from myself

Before I hurt somebody else again”

—Imogen Heap, Glittering Cloud

* * *

Something was slick on her hands and there was a heavy, coppery taste in her mouth. The same liquid dripped off her chin and plopped onto the ground in a steady rhythm.

The back of her head pounded, sending silvery, throbbing cobwebs of light behind her closed eyes. Vague recollections of scents and sounds flashed through her mind—car alarms, raised voices, shoes smacking concrete, teeth clicking together as they sliced the air and...

_Oh._

Blood.

She rolled onto her side, grit digging into her bare skin, the hair on her arms standing up against the chill of the early morning. Her eyes snapped open.

A few feet away from her, a man lay on his side, a dark pool spreading out behind him. She covered her mouth with one hand, but jerked it away after the stench of the blood on her hands stung her nose. Liz didn’t want to see what the front of the man looked like, but if she didn’t—if she just pulled on her clothes and ran away—, she would probably be wondering every day for the rest of her life if there was anything she could’ve done for him.

She swallowed, throat raw with bile that threatened to rise up the back of it. Wrapping her arms around herself, she skirted the crimson pool, making sure she didn’t leave tracks in it, as she walked to the front of the man.

One knee almost folded and she had to lean one shoulder against the wall, lips pressed together so she didn’t scream.

The man’s left arm was still pressed against his throat where he’d tried to protect himself. The arm was a shredded red mess, and the parts of the skin that were relatively unharmed by comparison were still marred by divots and scrapes left by teeth. His cheek had several scratch marks left by claws. She couldn’t see what his neck looked like under the barrier of his arm, and she didn’t want to, but from what she could see, his throat was reddened and torn too.

But she had to know if he was still alive.

Liz slowly knelt down, knees and hands pressed against the ground as she crouched and tilted her head near the man’s chest. She breathed through her mouth so the foul butcher house smell wouldn’t fill her nostrils.

Something as frail and as delicate as the flutter of a broken sparrow’s wings thumped every so often in the man’s chest, weak and, if left alone, would probably eventually stop altogether.

She had to do something. This was her fault. True, he had kicked her, but that didn’t mean he deserved to have his throat ripped open. He was just a drunk man that had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it hadn’t been for her, he probably would’ve just gone back to wherever he lived to sleep off a bad hangover and call in to tell his boss that he was taking a sick day. But she wasn’t a doctor. She couldn’t treat his wounds. The best she could do would be to call 911, though she couldn’t make the call from her own phone.

She cringed at her thought process. She was thinking like a criminal that was trying not to leave any evidence of their wrong doing. True, by all accounts, the scene merely looked like a horrific animal attack, but what if the authorities somehow suspected her, against all the odds? No, she couldn’t stay at the scene, and she couldn’t use her own phone.

She stood from her crouched position and walked to the cardboard where she’d hidden her clothes. Moving the cardboard, she picked up the pile of clothing and began to pull it on, watching as her hands left long, dark streaks of blood against the fabric. Liz couldn’t help but feel like she was branding herself.

Returning to the man, she pulled her sleeves over her hands and leaned over the man, choking again at the blood scent that floated over him. The tip of her fingers reached into one of his pockets, skimming over old lint until her fingernails clacked against a phone case. She pressed her free fist over her nose as she pulled the man’s phone out of his pocket and dialed 911.

After three rings, and a male operator picked up, giving the scripted delivery of, “911, what’s your emergency?”

“I came across a man in an alley, and he’s really badly injured. It looks like some kind of animal attacked him, maybe a stray dog or something,” she said, keeping her sleeve pulled down over her fingers. She knew from watching enough police procedurals that leaving fingerprints was the last thing she wanted to do.

The operator asked for details related to the man’s condition, and she did the best she could to answer without crying. As she described his injuries, images and sounds flitted through her mind—a man choking out a something that sounded like a sobbing plea as a growl came from the back of her throat before she bit into his arm again, claws pressing into his cheek as she stood on him and pinned him down.

“Okay, what’s the address?” the operator asked, fingers clicking against keys in the background.

She took a deep breath before answering. “I…I don’t know. But the alley looks like it’s across from a bar.” She walked closer to the mouth of the alley and told the operator the address of the bar.

“We’re sending someone over now. Stay with him, okay? And keep the phone on.” There was more typing, but she put the phone on the man’s chest and walked out of the alley.

She wasn’t going to stay there and be asked dozens of questions about why she was covered in blood, and there was no clear evidence that a dog had been there, aside from the man’s wounds. Would the reasonable assumption be that she had attacked him for some reason? If they tested the blood on her, they would know soon enough that it was the man’s blood. She’d seen occasional stories on the news about people taking drugs, losing their minds, and biting and attacking someone.

But if they pulled her DNA off the man, would it be human or canine? Or some strange amalgamation of both?

No, if she stayed, there were too many scenarios that could play out, and she wasn’t willing to let any of them come to pass. But still, as she walked further and further away from the alley, something curled up tight in her chest. After the incident when she’d attacked Michelle, she’d asked Sam if he thought that Michelle would become a werewolf. Liz had, after all, scraped Michelle with her teeth.

Sam told her that as far as he knew, it took more than a scrape or a bite to pass along lycanthropy. His friend told him that someone had to be badly bitten multiple times before they changed, and even then, there was chance—albeit a small, almost infinitesimal one—, that the body could fight off the infection. But if the man survived, the most likely outcome, was that he would be the same thing as her. Because of her, she might’ve condemned someone to the same nightmare she lived in.

Maybe it would’ve been better if she just left him to die.

 _No_. She shook herself and pressed a hand to her forehead. Calling for help was the right thing. Letting him die was what an animal would’ve done.

She dropped her hand and stopped walking. She had no idea where she was going. It was still early morning, that strange time of dark-light where the world was still waking up and people were just barely turning on their coffeemakers. Whatever part of the city she was in was still recovering from the previous night, but in about fourty five more minutes, there would be enough people on the sidewalks that a women covered in blood clothes would be a questionable sight.

She started walking again until she found a bench that sat beneath an awning next to a small store that wasn’t going to open for two more hours. Despite the fact that she felt like laying her head on her arms and crying, there wasn’t time for that now. She could let herself feel the full horror of what she’d done after she was at home in private.

But for now, the most important thing was to focus on the facts and fixing her immediate problems. The facts were: she didn’t know where she was, she looked like she’d just killed and gutted a farm animal, and she needed to get home somehow. She needed to find a solution to all this, but was essentially alone and had no one to rely on but herself. Except—

She hesitated for a moment, but still pulled her phone out of her pocket. Her thumb left dark smears on the screen, sections of her whorling fingerprints dotted across the glass as she scrolled through her contacts and found and selected Reddington’s number. She’d almost deleted it last week, finger only an inch away from pressing the “remove” option, but for some reason she just couldn’t. It took Reddington longer to answer than the last time she called him, but he still picked up before it went to voice mail.

“Lizzie?” His voice was thick and raspy like he’d just woken up. He was also probably still recovering from what he’d done the previous night as a wolf.

“Is something wrong?” His voice sounded clearer then, and filled with concern.

She wasn’t ready to fully answer that. “I don’t know where I am, and I…have blood on me. I need a ride to my apartment. I can tell you the address of the building closest to me, so could you come here and take me to my apartment?”

“Of course. What’s the address?”

She gave him the address and ended the call. Then, she distantly realized she’d just made two emergency calls.

* * *

When pulled up to the curb near the bench, they didn’t say anything to each other as she pulled her sleeve over her hand again, opened the door, and slid into the passenger seat. Liz wasn’t worried about leaving fingerprint evidence, but neither did she want to leave bloody marks on his car. As she sat down in the seat, his nostrils flared, eyes flicking to her hands, her mouth, then to the streaks she left on her clothes.

“I probably look like a walking Jackson Pollock painting,” she said, rubbing the back of her hand over her mouth. Dried blood flaked off her lips.

“I wouldn’t say you look quite as bad as a Pollock painting.” He looked away from her, jaw tight. He pulled away from the curb and began to drive in the direction of her apartment.

Maybe it was wrong of her to trust him to take her back home, but she didn’t think so. He was dangerous, there was no denying that, but nothing inside her told her that he was a danger to _her_ specifically.

“You’re not a fan of Pollock?” They were both tiptoeing around the obvious issue, but she still didn’t trust herself to explain what had happened without crying.

He lifted one shoulder in a dispassionate shrug. “I don’t hate his work, but I do think it’s overrated.”

“I’m just annoyed that he got paid so much for paint splatter.”

Reddington laughed at that, and they remained silent on the rest of the drive to her apartment. As he parked next to her building and she rested her hand on the door handle, she bit her lip, eyes fixed on the few darkened windows. One of them was hers. She turned back to him, hand still on the handle, leather squeaking under her legs.

“Do you…want to come up?” Liz wasn’t entirely sure why she asked. Under any other circumstances, she never would have. Part of her couldn't believe that she _had_ asked.

Maybe she just want to walk by herself into an empty apartment with someone else’s blood coating her skin and clothes, and then drag herself to the bathroom to be sick and cry until her head hurt.

Maybe she just didn’t want to be alone.

He blinked at her question, probably just as surprised as she was. “I will if you want me to,” he finally said.

“I do. And could I borrow your jacket for a minute? I don’t want anyone seeing me going into the apartment looking like this, so I’d like something to cover me.” Liz nodded down at herself.

He shrugged off his jacket in answer and handed it over to her. Liz pulled it on before getting out of the car, buttoning it up as she walked to the doors, aware of Reddington’s presence behind her. As she walked up the stairs, she and Reddington passed a woman walking down. She turned her head toward Liz, and she saw that the woman was someone that lived on her floor. The woman raised an eyebrow as she glanced between the two of them, and her eyes lingered on the jacket Liz wore. Liz just continued up the stairs, but she heard Reddington exhale in amusement behind her.

They made it to her level, and she fumbled with the keys when they walked up to her door. She hadn’t let anyone inside for along time, and besides that, she was double thinking her decision to let him inside. What was she going to say to him? Were they just going to sit there together in silence?

She stabbed the key into the lock, pulled her door open, and removed the keys. “Well,” she waved an arm at the dark room, “this is me.”

Bumping the edge of her hand against the light switch to illuminate the front room, she pulled the jacket off and offered it to him. Reddington pulled the jacket back on, and if the smell of the blood that had probably wiped onto it bothered him, he didn’t show it. She walked to her couch and sat down, legs pressed closed together, fingers clutching each other.

“How was your night?” She tried to smile, but she just felt like she was baring her teeth.

He sat down near her, but left a large amount of space between them. He crossed his legs and leaned back against the couch. “Uneventful for the most part.”

“Where do you go?” She picked at a thread that had come loose on her shirt sleeve.

“Usually out of D.C. and into a less developed area in one of the surrounding states.” Reddington glanced at her hands, and something pricked inside her, reminding her not to appear vulnerable. She lay her hands flat on her legs.

Liz nodded and tried to relax against the sofa. “That’s probably nice.”

He narrowed his eyes at her and frowned, still looking at her hands. “What happened to you?”

“I—” The words stuck in her throat like a sharp bone.

“I changed last night, and the wolf…I was confused. When I came back to the alley where I left my clothes, there was a drunk man there, and he kicked me, and—” Liz inhaled between her teeth, eyes stinging, throat tightening. “I attacked him. But he didn’t die, and now he might be infected.”

Despite her best efforts, a tear fell, and she swiped a hand over her cheek, turning away from him. “You can go,” she said, shoulder pressed against the back of the couch, head neck craned away from Reddington as her face tensed, trying to hold back the rest of the tears.

When she didn’t hear him get up, she jerked around to face him. His hands were loose in his lap, concern written across his face. “Didn’t you hear what I said?” she hissed, teeth clenched.

What was she doing? Just ten minutes ago, she’d invited him into her apartment, not wanting to be with alone with her houghts, and now she was trying to get him to leave as fast as she could. What was wrong with her? Her lips slid over back downher teeth and she exhaled, scrubbing a hand through her hair. A stiff, greasy piece of her bangs fell into her eyes. It was clumped with what might have been dirt or blood.

“I just—I thought that I was the only one. That I was alone. That I had to deal with this by myself,” she said, body rigid and stiff, pressing her lips so hard that her teeth dug into the inside of her mouth.

He reached out and pushed the stiff piece of hair out of her vision with the edge of his hand, the tip of his finger lingering on her cheek for a moment. “You’re not alone.”

Her entire body had felt cold and wrong from the moment she’d woken up, but she place he touched her was warm. She wasn’t quite ready yet to confront what letting a werewolf into her life meant, but if she wanted to avoid a similar incident to the one that had just occurred, perhaps she would consider accepting his help.

“I need to clean myself off.” She scratched at the back of her hand. “But I want you to come back tomorrow. I’ll let you help me, but only if you answer some questions.”

For a moment, it seemed like Reddington wouldn’t agree, but then he stood and nodded. “Tomorrow, then.”

* * *

After she turned sixteen, things should have been better. There was never an incident similar to the one with Michelle, but Liz found herself falling into circles she wouldn’t have pictured herself running in only just the year before. She found friends that enjoyed petty theft and small cons, and she started participating in their activities every once in awhile because she wanted to be accepted. Eventually, she grew used to the small crimes and even started enjoying them. After a while, she started dating Ryan, one of the boys in the group, and for once she felt integrated into something. _Pack_ , something whispered inside her, but she never let the thought fully germinate.

She told herself that maybe she was just being true to who she really was. The violence and aggression that her wolf self displayed didn’t come from nowhere, did it? Maybe it was simply a raw, unfiltered reflection of herself. Sam had indicated that her birth parents had both been werewolves, so maybe some people were just born wrong. They were just broken and twisted from the beginning.

Or maybe all of this wasn’t really her fault, and she fell outside of the human conceptions of good and evil. A canivore wasn’t evil, it just needed to survive, and a rabbit was no more kind or cruel than a fox. Everything in nature was just fulfilling its basic directive of survival.

But at the same time, even as she stole and lied, she received high marks on assignments and spent sleepless nights worrying about and studying for tests. She only dated Ryan for three months before their sophomore year ended. She broke up with him in June, and by the middle of Junior year, half her thieving friends had dropped out of school. By then, they'd drifted apart anyway. She started participating in their activities less and less, and finding herself thinking more over the consequences of her crimes, so perhaps she was more than an amoral animal if she felt guilty about the things she did. Animals didn’t quibble over their actions—they simply _did_ , without thought and without worry. Liz thought Sam suspected the things she’d done, but he never said anything, probably because he’d been the same at her age and knew she simply had to learn the consequences of a criminal lifestyle by herself.

In November of her senior year, she didn't shift. She sat in her cage the entire night, reading _Heart of Darkness_ , waiting for the transformation to come, nervous even as she scribbled notes on sticky notes, but she never felt the shift and warp of bone as the moon rose. When she told Sam, he was excited but tentative, and told her he didn’t know why she hadn’t changed.

Every month, Liz kept waiting to transform, but she never did. By the summer before college, she stopped using the cage, and worries over lycanthropic blood lust was in the distant past when the more pertinent concerns of preparing to move into a dorm and student loans descended upon her.

* * *

Liz canceled her appointments with clients for the next three days, telling them that she had become sick and needed some time to recover. After Reddington left, she threw her clothes in the garbage and took a shower so scalding that her skin looked like a lobster for two hours. And she had cried, almost immediately after he left, her body shaking and insides writhing as the attack repeated on a loop in her mind--shoe to the ribs, snap of teeth, gush of blood, pleading screams. By the time night came, she was exhausted and slept a deep, thoughtless sleep that she imagined only animals had the luxury of.

When she let Reddington in the next day, she’d prepared a barrage of questions to ask him, but only settled on those that were the most important. They sat on the couch in the same places they’d been the day before, though a bit closer.

Without waiting for him to say anything, she asked, “You said you knew Sam. He once told me that he had had a werewolf friend. Was that you?”

She suspected it was true, but starting off with the most obvious, benign thing was the easiest for her.

“Yeah, that was me.” His hands were pressed together, and he looked directly at her, unblinking. She wasn’t surprised he wasn't volunteering anymore information than was required—he had already established that he was secretive.

“How did you find me? Why do you want to help me?” Liz pressed her hand into the couch and scooted closer to him, leaning forward, eyes level with his. In many human cultures, eye contact was a sign of trust. In wolves, it was a sign of dominance or a challenge. She didn’t know which social custom she was adhering to.

“Sam contacted me before his death, and told me that with the divorce and his impending death, he was worried that you would change again. He wanted someone to be there for you in case it happened.” He still didn’t look away, but something in his eyes softened.

She blinked quickly, breathing out a laugh. Liz didn’t want to begin crying again, but the idea that Sam sent his old werewolf friend to help her, and the idea that Reddington didn’t seem to feel reluctantly obligated to help her, but rather somehow cared about her—

Liz lifted her chin. “I guess if Sam trusted you, I’ll let you help me.”

“Does this mean I’m inducted into your pack?” He grinned.

“No. And besides, two wolves doesn’t make a pack.” She crossed her arms and tried to keep her mouth constricted into a tight line, but the edge of her lips twitched.

“A pair, then—”

She held up a hand. Defining their partnership wasn’t happening—yet, at least. “Let’s just see how this works before adding labels, all right?”

Reddington spread his hands and pursed his lips. “Very well. But if you want my help, I suggest that we get started now. I have a lovely little patch of woods to show you if you’ll come with me.” He stood up from the couch and adjusted his jacket, waiting for her to stand.

“Isn’t this how a lot of dark fairy tales go—following someone mysterious man into the woods when he asks you to, then you end up turned into a tree or killed by a witch?” She stood, but kept her arms crossed. Mostly, she wasn’t being serious, but she still felt slight apprehension, even after agreeing to his help.

He came closer to her then, head tilted to the side as, mouth a crescent moon smile. “In this case, I would say neither of us have anything to worry about,” he said, breath stirring a piece of loose hair on her cheek. “We’re the things that the little red caped girl should be worried about, not the other way around.”

Liz had to concede his point—whatever his crimes, and whatever her misdeeds, they had more in common than she wanted to readily admit. It was beyond simply living with the same curse. It was something else. Like recognized like, and there was something in his eyes that she felt she understood.

“Into the forest we go, then.”

Without a thought, she slipped her hand into the corner of his arm, and they walked out the door. 


End file.
